JOINT
ASTROPHYSICS/JOINT PARTICLE SEMINAR
Date:
Wednesday, 18 February
2004
Time:
3:00 pm
Place:
4135 Frederick Reines Hall
Speaker:
Patrick McDonald, Princeton University
Title:
"The Lyman-alpha Forest Power Spectrum from the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey"
Abstract: The absorption in high redshift quasar
spectra by neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium, called the
Lyman-alpha forest, provides a good probe of the density field of the
Universe on scales of a few megaparsecs. I present the Lyman-alpha
forest power spectrum derived from 3300 SDSS quasar spectra (a factor
of 50 more than previous measurements). I describe the constraints on
the power spectrum of the initial density perturbations obtained by
comparing this observational result to the predictions of cosmological
numerical simulations. Finally, I show the cosmological parameters
obtained by combining the Lyman-alpha forest with the CMB and galaxy
clustering.
Host:
G. Chanan